kompong chhnang province – Kao Lon put down his hammer and glanced up at the sun. Noon. He rubbed his arm across his forehead and sat on his haunches among a few rocks in the shade of a thorny jujube tree. A large wall of rock, the quarry that is the source of his livelihood nowadays, stretched up in front of him, and from it came the ticking and thumping of hammer on stone.
Kao Lon, 39, has barely moved half a kilometer since he was a child soldier in the Khmer Rouge, one of thousands of laborers put to work by the Khmer Rouge to build what would become one of the largest airstrips in Southeast Asia. The quarry here started when Khmer Rouge cadres ordered workers to dynamite the mountain.
Today, not far from the quarry, the sleeping giant of an airstrip—manned now by just a few military guards, and some goats, chickens and cattle—lies as a reminder of the hand China played as a supporter of the Khmer Rouge.
It’s the kind of project China wants the world to forget, as it reportedly works behind the scenes to stall a Khmer Rouge trial that could highlight its assistance to the regime. But Kao Lon and others who saw the airstrip built remember well.
“I have been doing the same thing in the same place since I was 15 years old,” Kao Lon said as his seven children crowded around him. He spoke in a soft, rumbling voice, his face deeply tanned, his dark hair prematurely peppered with gray. “My team was in charge of breaking the mountain to lay down a base for this airport.”
The massive undertaking took thousands of workers, all of them working under the supervision of a handful of Chinese military advisors, he said. “There were maybe five or six” overseeing the workers as they laid slab after slab of heavy concrete to accommodate large airplanes.
Many died while making the airport, Kao Lon said. But his testimony, like those of others, cannot be backed up by any documents. On paper—at least in Cambodia—the airport does not exist.
The only thing researcher Youk Chhang knows about the airport has come from witness testimony. All of the paperwork likely left the country with the Chinese, said Youk Chhang, executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.
“The Chinese were completely in control of construction,” he said, but “they kept the documents themselves.”
The construction of the airport and the lives it cost is the kind of thing the Chinese government doesn’t want brought up as Cambodia prepares for a trial of Khmer Rouge leaders, said Lao Mong Hay, executive director of the Khmer Institute of Democracy. China was the major supporter of the Khmer Rouge, both when Democratic Kampuchea was in power from 1975 to 1979, and when the failed ultra-Maoist movement was fighting the forces of the Vietnamese-backed government here during the 1980s.
Singapore’s former president, Lee Kuan Yew, claims that China pumped as much as $1 billion into the Khmer Rouge through the 1980s.
Chinese leaders in Beijing have officially washed their hands of any involvement in backing the regime, which is blamed for the deaths of more than one million Cambodians.
Three Chinese Embassy officials said they had no knowledge of the airport, either in the past or now. Nor would they comment on how China’s roll at the airport might affect the upcoming trial of Khmer Rouge leaders.
China was here, Lao Mong Hay said. And not only were they helping the Khmer Rouge, he said, they were getting some things in return—a strategic airstrip in Kompong Chhnang, for example.
“At the time, China’s interests prevailed,” he said. The airstrip gave China “a sort of outpost or base,” Lao Mong Hay said.
Whatever the plans for the airstrip in the past, it has had no significance in the present, observers say. The airstrip has little strategic significance now, according to one Western defense expert. “I only thought of it commercially,” he said.
Another Asian defense expert said he had not considered the airport at all.
The future of the airstrip is uncertain. Several companies are preparing to finish the airport now.
But for Kao Lon, it is an inextricable part of his past, one that highlights the brutal conditions under which people worked for the Pol Pot regime.
Sitting in the shade beneath two tall mountains in what is now quiet countryside, he remembered looking over the place where the airstrip would be and seeing thousands of uniformed workers busily going about chopping down palm trees. The trees also provided sustenance to the already starving workers, who secretly picked off the dates and the young leaf sprouts to add to their rice soup.
“But we were never full,” he said.
Section after section of the airstrip was laid down, and Kao Lon said he saw many trucks being loaded with rice from the province. So much so, that a rumor spread among the workers and soldiers that for each slab they laid, the Chinese took one ton of rice.
He doesn’t remember exactly how many people were working at the site. “At the airport site, there were thousands from the army,” he said. “They were all wearing the black uniform and the blue krama—except the commanders and the Chinese men, who wore black uniforms with red krama.”
To look at the work in progress on the plain below the quarry site was to look across “a sea of black,” he said.
His team was in charge of dynamiting the mountainside. Men and women worked round the clock in shifts. Where he sat in the shade on a recent afternoon, twelve generators were set up to supply power to lamps to aid the workers.
He worked under the immediate command of a man named Ta L’vey, who oversaw the airport construction. He was commissioned to spy on his fellow soldiers to find anyone who might be secretly supporting the Vietnamese communists. In November and December of 1978, many soldiers were rounded up and put into trucks.
Some were driven to the mountains in the west; some were driven south. “They all disappeared,” Kao Lon said.
